A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

Some of the most vulnerable people to getting the SARS virus are health care providers. The general public, walking in the street, there is really not that much risk at all. It’s a very, very...

There cannot be any impediment to science that will ultimately be good to the general public.

Today we know the best way to prevent the spread of Ebola infection is through public health measures.

There is an urgent need for a protective Ebola vaccine, and it is important to establish that a vaccine is safe and spurs the immune system to react in a way necessary to protect against...

The immune system’s goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.

Disagreements are one of the fundamental positive aspects of science.

I run a modest-sized laboratory that’s looking specifically at what we call ‘the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease, or AIDS.’

I consider myself a perpetual student. You seek and learn every day: from an experiment in the lab, from reading a scientific journal, from taking care of a patient. Because of this, I rarely get...

We can sharply deflect the curve of HIV incidence.

Well I think the media has a very powerful influence on almost anything and everything we do because the general public gets their perception of what is going on in things they don’t have immediate...

The most pressing ethical question is to make sure that everything you do from a scientific standpoint is done for the ultimate good and positive issue for the people that you’re caring about.

The world is a place that is so interconnected that what happens in another part of the world will impact us.

I’m generally considered a conservative in my predictions for disease.

Knowledge goes hand-in-hand with truth – something I learned with a bit of tough love from my Jesuit education first at Regis High School in New York City and then at Holy Cross College in...

We need to know more about how group A strep interact with humans to cause so many different illnesses.

There’s always going to be the need for new medications, better medications.

What the immune system of man has in its advanced development is what we call immunological memory, so that once it sees something for the first time, when it sees it the second or the...

There has been treatment for hepatitis C, but the treatment has not been overwhelmingly effective, number 1. And number 2, it has had considerable toxicity.

When we can get the incidence of HIV down enough to turn the trajectory of the pandemic, it will assume a momentum of its own in diminishing HIV.

Investigating rare diseases gives researchers more clues about how the healthy immune system functions.

The Europeans have lots of data on the use of adjuvanted flu vaccine in the elderly, but I don’t think anybody has really good data on adjuvants in children.

You don’t have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

You can’t rush the science, but when the science points you in the right direction, then you can start rushing.

When you think in terms of public service, I heard so much about what Mother Theresa had done in her life. And I was fortunate enough to get a chance to meet her and talk...

When a company is fairly certain of a profit margin that is substantial, it can assume responsibility for the clinical trials to develop a blockbuster drug.

It’s extremely likely that the people who have never been exposed to a human who has leprosy, it’s very likely they got leprosy from exposure to an armadillo.

It’s very, very difficult when you have to prepare for something that might not ever happen.

The nature of a protective immune response to HIV is still unclear. Because in a very, very unique manner, unlike virtually any other microbe with which we’re familiar, the HIV virus has evolved in a...

Bioethics is a very, very important field. As we get more and more in the arena of understanding science and getting better opportunities, the fact that you can do things with biological sciences that have...

When I was a child, there were not that many vaccines. I was vaccinated for polio. I actually got measles as a child. I got pertussis, whooping cough. I remember that very well.

When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an...

When you’re dealing with a very sick person and you’re doing something to them, an intervention, be it a procedure or a medication, safety is critical.

Staph lives on skin. That’s the reason why many infections start as a boil.

There’s more than one way to get to the goal that you want to get to, but once you compromise your own principles, then you’re lost. You’re really lost.

Some people feel, you make your case, if they listen to you, fine, if they don’t, that’s it. That’s not what leadership is. Leadership is trying to continue to make a case.

Previous efforts to eradicate malaria failed for several reasons, including political instability and technical challenges in delivering resources, especially in certain countries in Africa.

You might be asking too much if you’re looking for one vaccine for every conceivable influenza. If you have one or two that cover the vast majority of isolates, I wouldn’t be ashamed to call...

You can have an epidemic in a state. You can have it in a region. You can have it in a country where the critical level of disease passes a certain threshold, and we call...

Human nature is weak.

Testing two vaccines against different H1N1s at the same time has never been done.

Antibiotics are a very serious public health problem for us, and it’s getting worse. Resistant microbes outstrip new antibiotics. It’s an ongoing problem. It’s not like we can fix it, and it’s over. We have...

Is it or is it not ethical to create an embryo, and to create a person for the purpose of getting an organ to give to someone else? Your knee-jerk reaction is ‘absolutely not;’ but...

There’s always the danger when you have influenzas that infect chickens, that when you have the close quarters of chickens spreading from one to another and occasionally a human coming into close contact, that there...

For the first time, we have the genetic sequences of all three of the players in the global malaria debacle: the parasite, the anopheles mosquito and the human. It’s a very important milestone.

Better ways to diagnose, treat and prevent E. coli 0157:H7 infections are badly needed.

I’m a born, cautious optimist.

The most confounding thing of all is that we still haven’t identified the cause of 20% to 30% of adult common colds.

Although it is still important to develop an HIV vaccine, we have significant tools already at our disposal that can make a major impact on the trajectory of this epidemic.